Fulltext search across more entities

slansky · **Joined:** Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:06 am **Posts:** 2

Hello.
I'm pretty new to Hibernate Search and now I'm trying to figure out the first bigger problem.

I'm able to make fulltext search on one entity using QueryBuilder. But I would like to make similar query across more entities that are not in relation - with one query and using standard Hibernate Search API. Is that even possible?

Thanks...

hardy.ferentschik · **Posted:** Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:29 am

Hi,

Having a QueryBuilder for multiple entities is at the moment not possible. It is an outstanding feature.
It is important to understand though that this does not mean that you cannot take the Lucene query generate by the query builder and apply a completely different set of filter classes. Let me explain. The most common usecase would be:

Code:

QueryBuilder qb = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory().buildQueryBuilder().
    forEntity( Foo.class ).get();

Query query = qb.keyword()
                     .onField( "bar" )
             .matching("fubar")
            .createQuery();

FullTextQuery fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(query, Foo.class);
fullTextQuery.list();

You are creating a query using the query builder for a certain entity and then apply the same entity as filter to the createFullTextQuery call. However, the Lucene query generated by the query builder does have no "enforced" connection to the entity passed to forEntity. The passed entity is in this case not a query restriction, but it just provides context for the query builder to apply automatic field conversion (you can eg pass an actual Date instance into matching which automatically gets transformed to a query string).
The entities passed to createFullTextQuery, however, apply filtering on the specified types. This also means that if you build a query for entity Foo and you have a second entity Bar which also has a field bar you could do something like this:

Code:

FullTextQuery fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(query, Bar.class);

I hope that was not too confusing. Arguably the query builder API implies different behavior. I guess the documentation could be cleared or maybe the query builder should actually add an entity restriction.

--Hardy

slansky · **Joined:** Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:06 am **Posts:** 2

Thanks, that was really helpful. I have altered my project acordingly and it seems to work like a charm :-)

andlio · **Joined:** Tue Jul 19, 2011 2:16 pm **Posts:** 19

Hi,

A few year later, I have the same problem... but no solution.

At the beginning, I would like to give the main abstract class for the entities requested, like the following :

Code:

QueryBuilder qb = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory().buildQueryBuilder().
    forEntity( AbstractFoo.class ).get();

Query query = qb.keyword()
                     .onField( "bar" )
             .matching("fubar")
            .createQuery();

FullTextQuery fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(query, AbstractFoo.class);
fullTextQuery.list();

But it seems it doesn't work...

What is your solution ?

sanne.grinovero · **Posted:** Sat Nov 10, 2012 6:30 am

Hi andilo, what do you mean with "it doesn't work" ? Could you provide some more details of what you expect and what you're actually having?